Dr Michael Stanley-Baker

MICHAEL
STANLEY-BAKER received his PhD in medical history from UCL in 2013. He
did his MA and PhD coursework in Chinese and Religious Studies at
Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a DiplAC for the practice of
acupuncture, and a three-year diploma in Chinese medicine, acupuncture
and tuina 推拿. He is a twenty-year practitioner of yoga, taiji and
martial arts. His research is concerned with the broader therapeutic culture
of medieval China, especially that which is recorded in the Daoist
Canon.

His PhD thesis focuses on medico-religious practices in the Zhengao 真誥
[Declarations of Perfection], a late 4th century collection of revealed
scripture, and highlights the absence of clear distinctions between orthodox
medicine, religious Daoism, cults of transcendence and other traditions in the Six
Dynasties period (222-589). It examines the kinds of knowledge about the body
in circulation during this time, who wielded that knowledge, and the kinds of
power it afforded: the power to heal; to attain transcendence; to perform
rituals; to contest imperial authority. It also discusses the aggregation of
technical and theoretical knowledge into broad repertoires of techniques and
discourses. The selection that actors made from available techniques, the
admixture of their salvific and therapeutic aims better describes the formation
of local cults and cultures than artificially discrete notions of ‘religion’
and ’medicine’.

Michael has held research
appointments at the Institute of History and Philology in Academia Sinica,
Taiwan, the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge and the University of
Pittsburgh. Michael currently serves as the Treasurer of the International
Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine, the leading scholarly
and practitioner organisation in this field.

His broader research
interests include the transformation of self
and identity through bodily practices in early medieval and modern China; the social history of therapeutic
practice; and the ways in which bodily experience and repertoires of self-care
span medical and religious practice, and notions of subjectivity and
objectivity. This has led him to
extend beyond focussing
on a central orthodoxy based in medical ‘classics’, to examine the broad
therapeutic diversity of China then and now. He also follows the
contemporary anthropology of medicine and of religion in China and Asia more
widely, and has done extensive fieldwork in Taiwan, Sichuan, and Maharashtra,
India.

Michael also engages in public outreach, gives practitioner-oriented
courses on literary Chinese for medical translation, and has developed
workshops on producing video clips for public outreach and research
presentations.

Forthcoming Monographs

The Medico-religious Market in
Early Medieval China

Daoists and Doctors: The role of
Medicine in Six Dynasties Shangqing Daoism.